Between God, the Dead and the Wild
Chamba Interpretations of Ritual & Religion
1st Edition
Published on 29. July 2019
288 pages
978-1-4744-6814-5 (ISBN)
Description
A study of the Chamba religion in two West African villages - one in Cameroon and one in Nigeria.
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03/1991
Edinburgh University Press
€59.62
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Content
- Intro
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Orthography
- Chapter 1 Protestations of ignorance? Or, things left unsaid?
- Two informants
- Ethnographic informants and information
- The limits of Chamba exegesis: lost and hidden meanings
- Mapeo and Yeli
- A tale of two informants
- Chapter 2 Ways of Being: the living, the dead, the wild and God
- People and Places
- Human company: the structing of sociality
- Inhuman company: the dead
- Inhuman company: animals and animality
- Metamorphosis: the living, the dead and the wild
- Chapter 3 Jup: the Mapeo variant of cult
- The ethnographer as initiate
- Jup
- Jup of the father
- Jup of the matrikin
- Jup and sexuality
- Interpreting the cults
- Chapter 4 Lera and v?ma: the Yeli Variant
- A different setting
- An ethnographer's continuing education
- Constitutive contrasts in Yeli
- Death, pollution and activity
- Lera and v?ma: a contrast of sound and performance
- Heat and coolness: a thermodynamic contrast
- Bodily integrity and partibility
- V?m and vad in Yeli
- Other avenues to the dead
- Chapter 5 The human span
- The company of death
- From birth to adulthood
- Circumcision
- Yeli
- Mapeo
- Rituals of death
- Mapeo: death and the performance of society
- Yeli: hierachy and exemplary death
- Circumcision and death
- Untitled
- Chapter 6 The annual ound
- Guinea corn: capacities for production, circuits of consumption
- The stages of growth: Yeli
- Y?d lum p?b
- K?l batna
- Kay batna
- V?m ning
- The elaborated harvest dance: Mapeo
- Jup ny?m
- Jup kupsa
- The final stages of the harvest festival
- Chapter 7 The animate wild
- The village and the grasslands
- The Chamba mask
- Creatures of the wild and of the village
- 'Stone': the hunting shrine
- Animals images
- The deaths of animals and the shredding of blood
- Chapter 8 Inanimate wilderness, and the nature of things
- Trees
- Medicines
- The nature of things: colour, gender, heat, number and form
- Human colours
- Inanimate colours
- The gender of the dead
- Partibility and the shedding of blood
- Chapter 9 The new religions of god
- A new politics of belief
- Islam and the jihad
- Colonial occupation
- Protestant and Catholic missions in Nigerian Chambaland
- The Chamba Separatist Movement of the 1950s
- Separation and after
- Protestant missions in Cameroonian Chambaland
- Mapeo
- Yeli
- Religion, language and power
- Chapter 10 God and the dead: locating the unknown
- A politics of knowledge
- Cultural pluralism and cultural empiricism
- People, masks and cults
- Different interpretations
- Beyond closure
- Appendix 1: Do different exegeses reflect only research methodolgy?
- Appendix 2: Notes on Chamba cults
- References
- Index
